Leasehold agreement not showing hallway landing

G_M

pineneedles wrote: »

Not an option sadly - already paid for the survey.
Speak to surveyor!
Vendor's in a rush as they are expecting a baby so their agent is hurrying us along.
agents always hurry buyers along - they want their commission. Ignore

We're keen to buy before we're priced out of the market and have lost out on all previous offers.
Then why post here for advice? Just rush in headlong and Complete the purchase
As such we don't have many options so I think we'd still want the flat even without the landing or the loft but in that case would really prefer this to be reflected in the price.

Re-negotiating price will slow the process down which the agent won't like......... Best to keep the agent happy and just pay the price agreed.

freeisgood

It sounds like possibly, at some point an owner of the flat decided to move his official front door to down the stairs (by building another new front door himself, and therefore enclosing the stairs as deeming the area "no use" for anyone else")

Does any evidence point to the flat having an original front door at the top of the stairs?

pineneedles

There's no evidence that the door has ever been anywhere else - no door out of the flat is shown on the plan included in the lease document so it could realistically only have been where it is now, otherwise it would be shown on the plan.

I really appreciate the advice and asked for it because I thought it seemed strange that an area which seemed obviously to be part of the flat didn't appear on the lease, but when I spoke to our solicitor he didn't seem concerned about this. So I posted here in order to get other opinions and weigh the pros and cons and decide what the risk is and what to do. At the moment it seems while the situation isn't ideal the actual risk isn't huge, also taking into account that as far as is apparent the current owner has used both the landing and the loft storage.

So I'm weighing all this up and will also wait to see what the solicitor says.

eddddy

Hi pineneedles

My 2 cents:

You should regard the landing and loft as "freebies" which you can use for the moment, but may be taken away from you at some point.

I guess the freeholder either doesn't know or doesn't care about the situation. Things might change, for example, if the freehold is sold. A new freeholder / investor may see this as a great opportunity to get some cash out of you for the landing and loft, as a bonus return on their investment.

pineneedles wrote: »

The survey is booked for next week so we'll see what that says.

A surveyor wont comment on the legal aspects of this. They will probably just assume that the landing is included in the flat, and value it accordingly - unless you tell them otherwise.

Is this the mortgage valuer/surveyor?

If you tell them not to include the landing in the valuation, they will probably flag this as an issue in the report that goes to your lender. (If you want to negotiate the price down, this may be a good thing. If you want a quick purchase at the current price, this may be a bad thing. But your solicitor may alert the lender anyway.)